Joan Didion was the writer who made modern California matter to American literature. But over the last twenty years, she also became something else: an icon. The sunglasses, the Corvette, the memes. What if that iconography is exactly what's getting in the way of understanding how good she actually was?

Evelyn McDonnell is a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University and the author of The World According to Joan Didion. Her book retraces Didion's footsteps: from Sacramento to New York to a gatehouse on Portuguese Bend, just up the coast from where McDonnell and host Aaron McKenzie both live in San Pedro.

Recording from that same stretch of Southern California coastline, McKenzie talks with McDonnell about Didion's method as a reporter — disappearing into the background, listening instead of interrogating — her complicated reckoning with the California pioneer mythology she was born into, and what it means to strip away "the Cult of St. Joan" to find the disciplined, unsentimental worker underneath.

Chapters:
00:00 — Intro
01:28 — Evelyn's Joan Didion origin story
03:20 — Who was Joan Didion?
05:00 — The Portuguese Bend gatehouse
06:16 — Retracing Didion's footsteps, place by place
09:27 — What you learn by standing where she stood
12:32 — How Didion made California literary territory
14:45 — Absorption and alienation
15:25 — Didion's reckoning with the pioneer myth
17:38 — Portuguese Bend, the imagined landslide, and The Year of Magical Thinking
18:44 — The edge of the continent
21:26 — Separating the writer from the icon
24:20 — Julian Wasser and the art of disappearing
27:57 — The girl in Haight-Ashbury, and the piece that made Didion's name
30:04 — The Central Park Jogger case, revisited
30:46 — How does Didion's writing outlast its moment?
33:12 — Where to start if you've never read Didion
35:53 — The moment Didion surprised her
36:44 — December 23rd, 2021
37:14 — What Evelyn learned about herself while writing this book

"The World According to Joan Didion" is available wherever books are sold.

Soundings is produced in partnership with San Pedro Today magazine. More info at aaronmckenzie.net/soundings